[Asterisk-Users] Priority usage: absolute sequential vs. sequential

[John Todd]

(Yes, today is the "John has an idea day")

So, in my now fairly extensive coding of extension priority lists, 
I'm getting very bored of re-numbering my priority lists every time I 
add something at the top of the list.  If I have a 7 step priority 
list, and I need to add something in at priority 2, then I have to 
re-number five other priorities, and if my Dial statement is 
somewhere higher than 2, I also have to renumber my "Busy" case 
numbers as well (but see my other email of a few minutes ago as to 
how this might be removed altogether.)

Anyway, I had the same headache with Cisco access lists many, many 
years ago when I was learning those syntaxes.  Then I discovered that 
those access lists didn't have to be exactly sequential; they could 
simply be generally sequential, meaning that instead of 1 followed by 
2 followed by 3, they could be 10 followed by 20 followed by 30. 
Then, when I wanted to insert something between 10 and 20, I would 
simply call it "15" and it would Just Work.  Granted, that only left 
me with 9 possible insertions between 10 and 20, but that normally 
was plenty.

Can Asterisk work in the same way with some minor tweaking?  This 
would really break almost nothing, and would be completely compatible 
with existing extensions.conf file syntaxes while allowing some 
additional sanity to be introduced.

The argument of "we can only go to 100 for any priority list, so 
jumping by 10 only allows for ten priorities in a given extension" is 
not valid, since you can jump by 5, or by 2, or you can use the 
old-fashioned exactly sequential method as well.  My response #2 to 
this is that the +101 syntax could be altered with a global variable 
that says "BUSYJUMP=1001" and the default would be "BUSYJUMP=101"  My 
response #3 to this is "Get rid of busyjump entirely and use a 
result-code dependant jump (see my other mail of a few minutes ago on 
this.)"

JT